Nintendo rose a fair few eyebrows in technology circles, as well as here at Sanitarium Towers, when it announced the 3D Classics line – classic games from older consoles such as the NES and Game Boy with a 3D graphic upgrade, offering a unique way to show of the power of the Nintendo 3DS handheld. While the idea has its merits, with a number of classic Nintendo titles getting the 3D Treatment – and persuading SEGA to join in and do the same to some classic SEGA titles – it has to be said that there are actually very few titles that have had the 3D Classic treatment.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take a NES game of your own choosing, and add 3D? If you’ve found yourself thinking that, you may want to check out Geod Studio’s new project, 3DNes – a work-in-progress Unity-based emulator that, as the name suggests, converts NES games into 3D.

Considering the simplicity of NES games, translating them into 3D is actually a difficult task. Unlike SNES games, which have four background layers, NES games have a single layer for the entire background. Imagine a diorama or a board game – everything in the background is printed on one board, while all the sprites – like your character the ground, enemies, items – are all just pieces on top. To allow the entire game to look 3D, 3DNes uses an algorithm that analyses the flat background and cuts it up into the pieces that make it up, then attempts to turn each piece into a 3D Object. The software is even clever enough to turn round objects into spheres or tubes, so for example, a ball will actually look like a ball instead of just a circle.

Exactly how well this works depends on the game in question, with things getting messier as the backgrounds get more complex. Games like my favourite franchise, Mega Man are translated well and benefit greatly from the effect, but games such as Contra or Castlevania somewhat struggle. Perhaps the best-emulated game is the original Super Mario Bros., which the developer admits was the main focus of the emulator and the most tested, which may explain the gap in quality between it and other games.

This having been said, Geod Studio hopes to improve the number of games that work well through subsequent beta releases, with head of the project Trần Vũ Trúc aiming for one-tenth of the entire NES library as his marker for success. He also suggests that there might be the potential for users to individually tailor the emulator for certain games, but is quick to state this is not currently the case, as he wants to ensure there’s “a strong emulation engine as the backbone” first.

At the moment, the emulator exists only online, as a WebGL game playable through the Unity Player. This means it only properly supports Mozilla-based browsers, such as Firefox or Seamonkey. It’s also extremely unstable, particularly when not using a AMD Graphics card, and may fail to go beyond loading the ROM, or even fail to work at all. However, Trần states that future releases of the emulator will be made available as software downloads, so it should only be a matter of time before we all get to try it properly.

This article originally appeared on Technically Motivated.

This week, Microsoft has touted a new initiative that they’ve said will unify platforms, making it easier to for developers to release games on both PC and Xbox One. But at least one major developer isn’t thrilled with Microsoft’s plans.

In an opinion piece published in The Guardian this morning, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney absolutely railed against Microsoft, calling upon other developers to fight against the corporation for “moving against the entire PC industry.” Specifically, Sweeney criticized Microsoft’s new Universal Windows Platform, which allows developers to build games and apps that can run across all of Microsoft’s hardware including Windows 10, Xbox One, and any Windows-branded tablets and phones.

The problem, Sweeney wrote, is that with UWP, Microsoft has created a closed ecosystem where developers must use the Windows Store and go through Microsoft’s certification processes to release games on that platform. Sweeney said he sees this as contrary to the spirit of PC development—a huge blow for Microsoft, as Epic is one of the biggest companies in the space. Epic is best known not just for their developer toolset, the Unreal Engine, but for creating the popular Xbox franchise Gears of War, which Microsoft purchased in 2014.

“They’re curtailing users’ freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers,” Sweeney wrote.

Microsoft disagrees with this assessment. Windows vice president Kevin Gallo told The Guardian in a response to Sweeney’s op-ed that Microsoft is not, in fact, building a closed platform. “The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store,” he said. “We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.”

Sweeney had criticized Microsoft for making it difficult and confusing to install UWP-developed apps outside of the Windows Store, pointing out that any user who wants to do so would have to dig through a series of convoluted menus and options. “It’s true that if you dig far enough into Microsoft’s settings-burying UI, you can find a way to install these apps by enabling ‘side-loading,’” Sweeney wrote. “But in turning this off by default, Microsoft is unfairly disadvantaging the competition. Bigger-picture, this is a feature Microsoft can revoke at any time using Windows 10’s forced-update process.”

The whole op-ed is brutal and worth reading, encouraging developers and customers to fight against Microsoft’s new initiative.

“As the founder of a major Windows game developer and technology supplier, this is an op-ed I hoped I would never feel compelled to write,” Sweeney wrote. “But Epic has prided itself on providing software directly to customers ever since I started mailing floppy disks in 1991. We wouldn’t let Microsoft close down the PC platform overnight without a fight, and therefore we won’t sit silently by while Microsoft embarks on a series of sneaky manoeuvre aimed at achieving this over a period of several years.”

Of course, all of Epic Games otehr games, the new Unreal Tournament, Paragon, etc are ONLY available through Epic’s own launcher, which also make you wonder if this is a case of pot and kettle…

What do you think?

The Valve-supported HTC Vive has today gone up for pre-ordering, but for a much higher price than its most well-known rival the Oculus Rift.

While they differ from region to region, the price of the Vive is above the Oculus’ new Rift headset which has been taking pre-orders for a little while now. For the US, including postage and all that other stuff that isn’t the price of the device alone the Vive will cost $829; the UK has the price set at £746.60 and the EU prices are somewhere around €972. This does mean that effectively the UK and Europe are having to pay a lot more for their tech than the US. It’s also far out matched by the Rift’s $599 price tag.

The Vive will come with the headset, some controllers to detect hand motions and three apps – Fantastic Contraption, Job Simulator and Google’s Tilt Brush drawing program; so there are some things there to justify it being more expensive than the Oculus is. The fact that Oculus were bought out by Facebook probably helps them keep the price down as well.

Either way, if you’ve got a lot of money to blow and would like to give the Vive a go, head over to the pre-ordering page.

AMD have been surprisingly quiet in recent weeks, seemingly pinning much of its business plan this year on its upcoming Zen line of processors; but it seems the time is being spent very deliberately and cleverly, with a heavy focus on Research and Development to improve its CPU Technology further. And if the most recent leak, which comes courtesy a CERN engineer who gave a talk at the IT Technical Forum on market trends concerning data centres, is to be believed, it may be about to pay off in a spectacular fashion.

Basing his claims on what evidently seems to be information supplied to CERN by AMD themselves, the engineer stated that Zen CPUs will benefit from Symmetrical Multi-Threading, which would seem to be AMD’s own version of Intel’s Hyper-Threading. More shocking, however, is that CPUs in the Zen line will apparently feature up to 32 physical cores in a single package, though this is spread over two 16-core modules within the same die – effectively two chips in one.

If that wasn’t enough, Zen will also apparently support 8-channel DDR4, meaning a computer with one of these monsters installed could feature 8 separate RAM cards. Assuming an 8GB card in each slot, this means a potential maximum of 64 Gigabytes of DDR4 RAM.. excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor.

The CERN engineer also reiterated previously leaked information about the Zen CPUs, which mainly focused on the point that these new CPUs are said to be able to handle 40% more instructions per clock than the current Excavator cores. Sadly, this was really all the information there was to glean from this leak – there is no news of a release date for any processor within the Zen line; and it is reasonable to assume that this monster processor is likely to wait to later in the launch cycle. For the first processor out of the gate, it is suggested that the line will start with the FX desktop CPUs – which are only expected to come in the now-standard 4, 6 and 8-core variants.

AMD appear to be seriously upping the game for CPU manufacturers and going far beyond anything done before if the claims are to be believe (and if you can’t trust an engineer at one of the major centres for scientific and technological research, who CAN you trust?). Could this spark some rivalry with the other major player in the scene, Intel? One thing’s for sure – this should only be good news for the processor market and its customers.

For their new game, Ubisoft constructed a game engine they called Snowdrop. It’s supposed to help support its lobby-free multiplayer functions along with the open-world, dynamic weathers and so on. Now we could see it being used for some of Ubi’s other IPs in the future.

Head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, was interviewed and revealed that Snowdrop could be seen in other franchises in future.

“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios. It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”

Also, the Division’s ‘Dark Zone’ could see the functionality traveling across to other teams under Ubisoft’s umbrella as well in future. “I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”

Ubisoft have recently announced their intention not to make a new Assassin’s Creed game in 2016, so I wonder if a desire to build their next game in that series upon this game engine is a part of that? It’ll be interesting to see if that theory holds water when the next one is announced.